With a security vulnerability in ATI's Catalyst driver installer for Microsoft Windows Vista being exposed (dubbed the "purple pill"), engineers have been scurrying to address this problem. The Inquirer is reporting that the patched driver will be released tomorrow (Monday) and that it will be Catalyst 7.8 that gets released. Going by past tradition and what was shared in The Truth About ATI/AMD and Linux, if the ATI Catalyst 7.8 driver for Windows is released tomorrow, so will the next ATI Linux "fglrx 8.40" driver.

What this means is stay tuned to Phoronix to find out what the fglrx 8.40 driver has in store for Linux users, which we will share with you upon the Linux driver's availability. In the meantime you can head on over to the forums and have a try in our Name The Next ATI Driver Contest. We've been running this thread now for the past couple of ATI driver releases. Among the contenders for the 8.40 driver are: waiting for 8.41 edition, Crash a-lot Edition, 3d is soooo 90s, and FGLRX - Farly Gnarly Lump of Random X code.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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